Talk about “dying with dignity” has grown to a calamitous pitch in recent years. “Right to die” groups vie for supremacy, trying to show who can make the dying experience the least degrading. Who can replace the utter macabre-ness of the necessity of death with something more palatable.
In this reclamation of death ― a change from the silence of the past decades, when the subject was even hidden from children ― the focus on dignity is an admirable, yet somewhat clumsy, catch-all for how we should all want to die.